Business

4 ways to make your company culture a major recruiting asset

This article is part of DBA, a new series on Mashable about running a business that features insights from leaders in entrepreneurship, venture capital and management.

When you’re growing a very product-focused, engineering-driven company, you find that culture is a top concern for many interviewees.

In a competitive hiring environment like Silicon Valley, prospective employees have extraordinary leverage in considering opportunities. Aside from the standard perks, they want to work in a happy, productive and respectful setting.

Good pay is nice, but not if it comes at the expense of work/life balance, inspiring projects and a boss who treats you well.

Leverage multi-media and creative resources to put your culture on display. You can do this through building out your corporate LinkedIn page or creating a detailed jobs page on your website. Try creating a video about life in your company and at your offices and leverage it on multiple outlets to give viewers a visual sense of your culture.

Once a recruit reaches out, it’s important to make sure they hear from you.

To start, make sure your recruiters have time to respond to all the queries they get from prospective employees. Doing so shows that you see all potential hires as real people, not just another email in a queue of hundreds. It’s worth it to take the time to communicate with all applicants in order to demonstrate the respectful nature of your culture.

2. Let your data do the talking...or at least some of it!

Particularly when you’re recruiting and interviewing data scientists and programmers, be transparent about your data. Sharing your data-driven insights will appeal to the empirical minds of this type of employee and show that you’re a smart, on-the-ball enterprise that mines its data and reacts accordingly.

Sharing relevant data with other prospective employees — aside from those on the technical side — is also good business.

Keep in mind that many of them are looking for a job that combines the unique challenges of a startup with the job security of a larger company. Having and sharing strong data that supports your company’s history and current success and informs your future plans will go a long way toward attracting amazing programmers and other employees.

3. Let your interview practices reflect your culture

Try to create an interview that allows the candidate to get a glimpse of your company’s working environment and their prospective day-to-day duties.

For example, you might consider giving a prospective employee a machine with your environment in a sandbox and have them show their work on the big screen as they do a task that they would actually do at your company.

Make sure your candidate meets with all core team members, and even ones that might not be directly on their team. It’s crucial that he/she gets a sense of the entire office “vibe”. Consider giving each candidate a tour of your whole office and having them meet the executives, if possible.

4. Hire from a variety of places

When it comes to recruitment and hiring, it’s important to be cohesive so everyone is on the same page. Listen to your employees.

Make sure to prioritize their referrals and take the time to follow up. Our top source of candidates is referrals, and that says a lot about the culture we’ve created. If our employees like their work so much that they are encouraging friends and colleagues to join us, then we know we have created a good environment.

Outside of referrals, hire from a variety of sources—online, meet-ups and even hacker groups. Employee referrals are great, but finding other ways to generate candidates is key. Recruiting from a variety of sources helps ensure that you diversify your talent and keeps the candidate funnel full.

You won’t develop a company culture overnight; it’s something that happens over time.

Creating an environment where people are excited to come to work requires investing a lot of time and money into your employees and the space they share.

That process starts with recruitment. Making sure that your office culture is represented from start to finish in the recruitment process — from those first emails to signing on the proverbial dotted line — will only strengthen your enterprise.

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